We Should Stop Using JavaScript According to Douglas Crockford [video] (youtube.com)

20 years ago, I was advocating for JavaScript.

My story was that JavaScript is a much better language than anybody knows

and that if we use it properly we can do amazing things about it and it can change the world

and in fact that happened.

But now my evangel is that

we should stop using JavaScript.

That it has so many congenital defects it really is a smelly language.

There's a just a lot of crap in it.

And it's still maybe for its field of application

the best language in the world for doing that kind of stuff

but that's not good enough.

We should be moving on to the next generation of languages.

It used to be that we'd get new computer languages about every generation.

I started with Fortran and then C and

C++ and Java and JavaScript and so on and then it kind of stopped.

There are still people developing languages but nobody cares.

One person can make a programming language, a really good one,

but you can't get adoption for it.

There are lots of terrible mistakes in the way that the web works,

in the way our operating systems work, and we can't get new ones.

We're just stuck with this crap and they keep piling new features on everything

and the new features always create new problems and

it doesn't have to be like that. We could be using really clean operating systems

with really clean languages and really clean runtimes and doing all this stuff

in a much more reliable way.

But we don't seem to want to do that.

I've done JavaScript for a generation.

It's time for the next thing.